‘Casting Off Abramoff’ now includes associate Tony Rudy____________________

The Center for Responsive Politics has corrected a March 30 report that inadvertently overstated the amount of money that Jack Abramoff’s clients made in federal political contributions while he was their lobbyist.

After reviewing the methodology and data of “Casting Off Abramoff,” the non-partisan research organization determined that the disgraced lobbyist, his associates and clients contributed at least $5 million to members of Congress, their political action committees, other candidates for federal office and political parties. As was originally reported, Abramoff’s clients spent $50 million to lobby Congress and the executive branch—in all, $55 million spent on political influence.

CRP found that the major patterns identified in the original report are still supported by the revised data. Most current members of Congress received contributions from an Abramoff client while he represented them. The giving strongly favored Republicans—Abramoff himself gave exclusively to the party. The revised report and supporting data tables are available on the Center’s newsletter Web site, CapitalEye.org.

The Center for Responsive Politics was the first to measure the political influence of all of Abramoff’s clients, not just the Indian tribes embroiled in the lobbying scandal now unfolding in Washington. “Casting Off Abramoff” initially stated that political contributions from the lobbyist and his wife, his clients and convicted associate Michael Scanlon totaled $22 million between 1998 and 2004. That figure accurately tallied political contributions that Abramoff’s clients made; however, it inadvertently included periods of time when Abramoff’s name did not appear on some clients’ lobbying disclosure forms.

This oversight in the otherwise conservative study resulted in the inclusion of contributions received when Abramoff was no longer working for certain clients. In some cases, he had stopped representing the client several years before but his termination had not been reported appropriately. To produce the “Casting Off Abramoff” report, CRP matched lobbying records from the Senate Office of Public Records with campaign finance disclosures collected from the Federal Election Commission.

“This was a complicated project from the start,” said Sheila Krumholz, the Center’s research director and acting executive director. “In designing our methodology we tried to account for all the complexities as well as shortcomings of the disclosure system. We didn’t uniformly apply our conservative methodology throughout the research, and we should have. That resulted in overstatement, something we always try to avoid and regret in this instance. After being alerted to a single error, we looked more closely and realized we had to correct the data as quickly as possible.”

CRP has now revised its report, and updated it to comprise contributions made between 2001 and 2004 by Abramoff associate Tony Rudy and his wife, Lisa. He has pleaded guilty to conspiracy since the report’s initial release.

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